Thinking to Believe

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Mark 1:29-34  And immediately he left the synagogue and entered the house of Simon and Andrew, with James and John. 30 Now Simon’s mother-in-law lay ill with a fever, and immediately they told him about her. 31 And he came and took her by the hand and lifted her up, and the fever left her, and she began to serve them. 32 That evening at sundown they brought to him all who were sick or oppressed by demons. 33 And the whole city was gathered together at the door. 34 And he healed many who were sick with various diseases, and cast out many demons. And he would not permit the demons to speak, because they knew him. (ESV)

In 1921 Franciscan archaeologists uncovered a 5^th century building made up of three co-centric octagons[1] that was, by tradition, built over the site of Peter’s house.  It is only 84’ from the synagogue in Capernaum.  It was not until excavations were renewed in 1968 that they found an apse and a baptistery, making it possible to identify this structure as a basilica.

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At long last archaeologists have finally determined the purpose of Stonehenge.

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After being rejected in Nazareth (Luke 3:23; 4:16-30), Jesus went to Capernaum and stayed with Peter (Mt 4:13; Mk 2:1). Capernaum continued to be his base of operations for the rest of Jesus’ ministry.  Many important events occurred in Capernaum, some of them in the synagogue there. Capernaum is where:

• Jesus taught in the synagogue (Mk 1:21; 3:1; Jn 6:59).
• Jesus healed the man with the withered hand in the synagogue (Mk 3:1-6)
• Jesus cast out a devil from a man in the synagogue (Lk 4:31-37)
• Jesus said one must eat His flesh and drink His blood to have life (Jn 6:48-60)
• the man with palsy was lowered through the roof (Mk 2:1-12)
• the coin was found in the fish’s mouth to pay the tribute (Mt 17:24-27)
• the centurion’s servant met Jesus to seek healing for his master’s beloved servant (Lk 7:1-10)

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Luke 3:1  In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judea, and Herod being tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother Philip tetrarch of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias tetrarch of Abilene. (ESV)

Luke mentions a “Lysanias” the tetrarch who was in power in AD 29, but there was no historical record of him outside of Luke’s account.  But then an inscription near Damascus was found reading, “For the salvation of the Au[gust] lords and of [all] their household, Nymphaeus, free[dman] of Ea[gle] Lysanias tetrarch established this street and other things.”

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Jn 9:6-11  [H]e spat on the ground and made some mud with the saliva. He smeared the mud on the blind man’s eyes 7 and said to him, “Go wash in the pool of Siloam” (which is translated “sent”). So the blind man went away and washed, and came back seeing. 8 Then the neighbors and the people who had seen him previously as a beggar began saying, “Is this not the man who used to sit and beg?” 9 Some people said, “This is the man!” while others said, “No, but he looks like him.” The man himself kept insisting, “I am the one!” 10 So they asked him, “How then were you made to see?” 11 He replied, “The man called Jesus made mud, smeared it on my eyes and told me, ‘Go to Siloam and wash.’ So I went and washed, and was able to see.” (NET)  See also Isaiah 8:6 and Nehemiah 3:15.

Historically there have been three pools called Siloam.  The first was built by Hezekiah (it has not been discovered).  The second was the one that existed in Jesus’ day, built in the early 1^st century BC.  The third was the site at which Empress Eudocia built a church in the 5^th century.

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There has been a long debate over whether or not abortion is directly tied to poor mental health.  In 2008 the American Psychological Association concluded that there wasn’t any research supporting the idea that abortion caused poor mental health.  A new study published in the British Journal of Psychiatry, however, is challenging this conclusion.

This new study is a meta-analysis of 22 previous studies which examined the mental health of 877,000 women, of which 163,831 had an abortion.  According to the study, “the results revealed that women who had undergone an abortion experienced an 81 per cent increased risk of mental health problems, and nearly 10 per cent of the incidence of mental health problems were shown to be directly attributable to abortion.”  Having an abortion was found to increase one’s risk of experiencing the following:

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A stone measuring 8’ x 3’3” with a Hebrew inscription that reads “To the Trumpeting Place to [proclaim] [separate]” was excavated by Eilat Mazar at the southern foot of the Temple Mount in the 1970s.

The trumpeting place is where the priests would stand to blow trumpets announcing the beginning and end of the Sabbath.  This is believed to be a part of the Second Temple.  It is currently located in The British Museum.

Significance:

1. This inscription is possibly part of the very temple Jesus regularly visited.

In ancient Egypt there was a city called Per-Medjed, which was the capital of the 19th Upper Egyptian Nome.  After the conquest of Egypt by Alexander the Great in 332 BC, the city was reestablished as a Greek town, called Oxyrhynchou Polis (“town of the sharp-snouted fish”).  In Hellenistic times, Oxyrhynchus was 3^rd largest city in Egypt.  Outside the city was a series of garbage dump sites, at which the inhabitants of Oxyrhynchus would dump their garbage.  They dumped their garbage there for more than 1,000 years.

Beginning in 1896 archaeologists discovered 500,000 papyri buried in these dump sites.  Ten percent of the texts were literary documents.  The rest consisted of public and private documents: codes, edicts, registers, official correspondence, census-returns, tax-assessments, petitions, court-records, sales, leases, wills, bills, accounts, inventories, horoscopes, and private letters.  Some of literary texts were Christian documents: (more…)

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Between 1947 and 1956 a total of 972 ancient documents were discovered in 11 different caves near Khirbet Qumran on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea (~13 miles from Jerusalem).[1]  Approximately 25% of the texts contain Biblical texts.  The rest were apocryphal texts (Tobit, Enoch, Jubilees, etc), or texts peculiar to the community that copied them (Community Rule, War Scroll, etc.).  Every book of the Hebrew Bible, except Esther and Nehemiah[2], is among them. 

The manuscripts are written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, and are dated between 250 BC and AD 70.

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I’m always bothered when Christians speak of God “healing” someone through surgery, or when they call something a “miracle” that does not clearly bear the marks of supernatural intervention. While we should ultimately thank God for all good things, if a surgeon fixes your body, then it was not a divine healing–it was a medical healing.

We should thank God for giving the doctors the knowledge and wisdom to fix our body, but to attribute the healing to divine intervention cheapens the Biblical concepts of divine healing and miracles. When God performs a healing, surgeries are not necessary. When God does a miracle, His direct involvement will be obvious because the outcome will defy a naturalistic explanation. Did your headache go away? Great, thank God for it. But if you popped an Aspirin at the same time you prayed for the headache to go away, you should probably be buying shares in pharmaceutical companies rather than telling people God healed your headache.

Those who wish to change the historic definition of marriage so as to include couples of the same sex often argue that marriage is a fluid institution with an evolutionary history.  One of their favorite examples is polygamy.  Polygamy used to be an acceptable form of marriage, but such is no longer the case in most societies.  They think it follows that if the definition of marriage is flexible enough to change in this fashion, then it should be capable of including people of the same sex as well.

The problem with this argument is that polygamy is not an exception to the “male and female” understanding of marriage.  Rather, it is an exception to the concept of monogamy.  Polygamy did not involve multiple partners in a single marriage, but rather multiple, concurrent marriages.  This can be demonstrated by the following:

1. Each wife entered into a marriage with the man at different points in time.
2. It was possible for the man to divorce one wife without divorcing all his wives.
3. The women in the relationship only viewed the man as their spouse, not the other women.

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2 Kings 25:26  Then all the people, both small and great, and the captains of the forces arose and went to Egypt, for they were afraid of the Chaldeans. (ESV)

Nehemiah 2:17-19  Then I said to them, “You see the trouble we are in, how Jerusalem lies in ruins with its gates burned. Come, let us build the wall of Jerusalem, that we may no longer suffer derision.” 18 And I told them of the hand of my God that had been upon me for good, and also of the words that the king had spoken to me. And they said, “Let us rise up and build.” So they strengthened their hands for the good work. 19 But when Sanballat the Horonite and Tobiah the Ammonite servant and Geshem the Arab heard of it, they jeered at us and despised us and said, “What is this thing that you are doing? Are you rebelling against the king?” (ESV)

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Ezra 1:1-4  In the first year of Cyrus king of Persia, that the word of the Lord by the mouth of Jeremiah might be fulfilled, the Lord stirred up the spirit of Cyrus king of Persia, so that he made a proclamation throughout all his kingdom and also put it in writing: 2 “Thus says Cyrus king of Persia: The Lord, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth, and he has charged me to build him a house at Jerusalem, which is in Judah. 3 Whoever is among you of all his people, may his God be with him, and let him go up to Jerusalem, which is in Judah, and rebuild the house of the Lord, the God of Israel—he is the God who is in Jerusalem. 4 And let each survivor, in whatever place he sojourns, be assisted by the men of his place with silver and gold, with goods and with beasts, besides freewill offerings for the house of God that is in Jerusalem.”  (See also 2 Chron 36:22-23 and Is 44:28)

In 1879 a 9” long clay cylinder was discovered in ancient Babylon.  Dating to 539 BC, it records Cyrus’ conquest of Babylon and his decree to let captives return to their lands and restore their temples.  It reads:

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Daniel 5:1,5-6,13,16-31  King Belshazzar made a great feast for a thousand of his lords and drank wine in front of the thousand. … 5 Immediately the fingers of a human hand appeared and wrote on the plaster of the wall of the king’s palace, opposite the lampstand. And the king saw the hand as it wrote. 6 Then the king’s color changed, and his thoughts alarmed him; his limbs gave way, and his knees knocked together. … 13 Then Daniel was brought in before the king. The king answered and said to Daniel, “You are that Daniel, one of the exiles of Judah, whom the king my father brought from Judah. … 16 But I have heard that you can give interpretations and solve problems. Now if you can read the writing and make known to me its interpretation, you shall be clothed with purple and have a chain of gold around your neck and shall be the third ruler in the kingdom.” 17 Then Daniel answered and said before the king, “Let your gifts be for yourself, and give your rewards to another. Nevertheless, I will read the writing to the king and make known to him the interpretation. 18 O king, the Most High God gave Nebuchadnezzar your father kingship and greatness and glory and majesty. 19 And because of the greatness that he gave him, all peoples, nations, and languages trembled and feared before him. Whom he would, he killed, and whom he would, he kept alive; whom he would, he raised up, and whom he would, he humbled. 20 But when his heart was lifted up and his spirit was hardened so that he dealt proudly, he was brought down from his kingly throne, and his glory was taken from him. 21 He was driven from among the children of mankind, and his mind was made like that of a beast, and his dwelling was with the wild donkeys. He was fed grass like an ox, and his body was wet with the dew of heaven, until he knew that the Most High God rules the kingdom of mankind and sets over it whom he will. 22 And you his son, Belshazzar, have not humbled your heart, though you knew all this, 23 but you have lifted up yourself against the Lord of heaven. And the vessels of his house have been brought in before you, and you and your lords, your wives, and your concubines have drunk wine from them. And you have praised the gods of silver and gold, of bronze, iron, wood, and stone, which do not see or hear or know, but the God in whose hand is your breath, and whose are all your ways, you have not honored. 24 “Then from his presence the hand was sent, and this writing was inscribed. 25 And this is the writing that was inscribed: Mene, Mene, Tekel, and Parsin. 26 This is the interpretation of the matter: Mene, God has numbered the days of your kingdom and brought it to an end; 27 Tekel, you have been weighed in the balances and found wanting; 28 Peres, your kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and Persians.” 29 Then Belshazzar gave the command, and Daniel was clothed with purple, a chain of gold was put around his neck, and a proclamation was made about him, that he should be the third ruler in the kingdom. 30 That very night Belshazzar the Chaldean king was killed. 31 And Darius the Mede received the kingdom, being about sixty-two years old.

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Remember the discovery reported in all of the news outlets earlier this year of lead codices that would shed new light on early Christianity?  I blogged back in April that these codices appeared to be forgeries.  Since then, more evidence has come rolling in that is decisive in this regard.  The best summary of the evidence is presented in this YouTube video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGw0orL78I4&feature=colike

Jeremiah 39:1-3  In the ninth year of Zedekiah king of Judah, in the tenth month, Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon and all his army came against Jerusalem and besieged it. 2 In the eleventh year of Zedekiah, in the fourth month, on the ninth day of the month, a breach was made in the city. 3 Then all the officials of the king of Babylon came and sat in the middle gate: Nergal-sar-ezer, Samgar-nebu, Sar-sekim the Rab-saris, Nergal-sar-ezer the Rab-mag, with all the rest of the officers of the king of Babylon. 

Nebo-Sarsekim was an official under Nebuchadnezzar II, present for destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BC.  He was only known from the Biblical record until his name was discovered in 2007 on a tiny clay cuneiform tablet (2.13”) uncovered in Sippar (one mile from Baghdad) in the 1870s.  It was acquired by the British Museum in 1920, but lay dormant until 2007 when Michael Jursa—associate professor at the University of Vienna—rediscovered it and revealed its contents to the world.

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Recently an article appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences[1] which concluded that observed changes in biological populations are usually short-lived, and typically fail to spread through the entire species.  According to lead author and zoologist Josef Uyeda (Oregon State University), “Rapid evolution is clearly a reality over fairly short time periods, sometimes just a few generations. But those rapid changes do not always persist and may be confined to small populations. For reasons that are not completely clear, the data show the long-term dynamics of evolution to be quite slow.”  He and his team concluded that it takes approximately one million years for a biological change to take root in a population.

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I spent five weeks teaching a series on Biblical archaeology recently (hence all the posts on Biblical archaeology).  Seeing my interest in ancient artifacts, one of the men from our church, Tony, gave me a coin of Constantine I.  Not only was Constantine I the first Christian Roman emperor, but he was also the first Roman emperor to legalize Christianity (technically Emperor Galerius legalized Christianity two years before Constantine, but Galerius’ edict did not restore the Christians’ confiscated property).  Christianity had been an illegal religion for nearly 250 years before Constantine.  He was also the one who called for the first church council at Nicea in AD 325.  And I am the owner of one of the coins minted with his image on it!

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Jeremiah 37:3; 38:1-6  King Zedekiah sent Jehucal the son of Shelemiah, and Zephaniah the priest, the son of Maaseiah, to Jeremiah the prophet, saying, “Please pray for us to the Lord our God.” 38:1 Now Shephatiah the son of Mattan, Gedaliah the son of Pashhur, Jucal the son of Shelemiah, and Pashhur the son of Malchiah heard the words that Jeremiah was saying to all the people, 2 “Thus says the Lord: He who stays in this city shall die by the sword, by famine, and by pestilence, but he who goes out to the Chaldeans shall live. He shall have his life as a prize of war, and live. 3 Thus says the Lord: This city shall surely be given into the hand of the army of the king of Babylon and be taken.” 4 Then the officials said to the king, “Let this man be put to death, for he is weakening the hands of the soldiers who are left in this city, and the hands of all the people, by speaking such words to them. For this man is not seeking the welfare of this people, but their harm.” 5 King Zedekiah said, “Behold, he is in your hands, for the king can do nothing against you.” 6 So they took Jeremiah and cast him into the cistern of Malchiah, the king’s son, which was in the court of the guard, letting Jeremiah down by ropes. And there was no water in the cistern, but only mud, and Jeremiah sank in the mud. (ESV)

In 2005 Eilat Mazar discovered a bulla bearing Jehucal’s name inside a stone complex (that she thinks is the remains of David’s palace) in Old City Jerusalem, near the Dung Gate.  It is only 0.4”, and dates to the 6^th century BC.  (more…)